The passing of a Sixties showman

When I once complained to him about an unflattering mention I’d gotten in a New Yorker article about Allen Ginsberg, Warren Hinckle shot me a derisive look and said out of the corner of his mouth in his distinctive gravelly voice, “Listen, Collier, the only bad press you ever get is your obituary.” This was not just a bon mot but a first principle, so it was ironic that, when Hinckle died in his native San Francisco a few weeks ago at age seventy-seven, his own obituaries were the best press he had gotten in many years, acknowledging his significant achievement midwifing the rebirth of muckraking journalism as the editor of Ramparts magazine in the mid–1960s and giving New Left ideas a raucous four-color presence in the political culture that calamitous era created.

When I joined Ramparts in 1966, Hinckle was already well on his way at age twenty-seven to becoming a living legend. While most of the staff came to work in street-fighter chic, he had his own homemade version of bella figura, showing up most days in a tie and three-piece suit, although sometimes changing pace with patent leather dancing pumps and a maroon velvet jacket. Jowly and plump and conveying an impression of fluid retention, he was an imperious alcoholic and only those who didn’t realize how Irish he was regarded it as paradoxical that he should become more fluent and inventive the more he drank, and that he never—even after several hours at Cookie Pacetti’s, the working-class watering hole where he went to escape intellectuals and politicos—appeared drunk.

He had lost an eye in a childhood accident, and the eye patch he wore with as much panache as the Hathaway Man became a sort of calling card. (When my son Andrew, then four, first saw Warren, he called him with precocious accuracy “that pirate guy.”) He kept a capuchin monkey named Henry Luce in a large cage in his office, sometimes letting him ride on his shoulder as he dictated letters to his long-suffering secretary, Maureen, who also cleaned Henry’s cage. When Maureen handed him a letter too critical of Ramparts or too importunately demanding payment of past due bills, he would grab a felt-tip pen, scrawl “fuck you” over the text, and return to sender.

He was something of a boulevardier who vastly preferred the company of Howard Gossage, Herb Caen, and other San Francisco personalities of the day to that of the baleful utopians who hung around the magazine. He liked living large and on the brink, kiting checks to fly often and always first class to New York where he stayed at the Algonquin to insinuate himself into the company of its literary ghosts while basking in the glory Ramparts brashly reflected from the West Coast. (Undeterred by a domestic air strike, he once made the round trip via London at the cost of a then-staggering fifteen hundred dollars.) He would sometimes take selected staff members for lunch to Andre’s, an excellent French bistro a few doors up from the Ramparts headquarters on Broadway (the leg of lamb smothered in flageolets lingers on the palate of memory) and after the dishes were cleared horrify the maître d’ by pulling out his fountain pen and outlining some convoluted story in splotchy ink on the starched tablecloth.

Most of the rest of us were radicals for whom journalism was revolution by other means. Warren, however, had been editor of his high school paper and also of The Foghorn at the University of San Francisco; his first job out of college was as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. But even though he wanted to be Citizen Hinckle or at least one of those characters in suspenders who emerge periodically from their offices in Front Page to yell “Stop the presses!,” Warren understood better than anyone that the Sixties’ Zeitgeist was headed in another direction. So when Edward Keating, a wealthy Menlo Park attorney who had started Ramparts in 1962 as a post–Vatican II liberal Catholic quarterly, offered him a job promoting stories such as an exposé of the key role played by New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman in deepening the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Warren immediately seized the main chance.

He eventually convinced Keating to hire him full time, to take the magazine monthly, and to move it to San Francisco. Then, when Keating’s modest fortune was exhausted by Warren’s depraved spending habits, Warren found other investors and used them as a fulcrum to take over Ramparts himself, leaving Keating standing in the rear view mirror of history with the look on his face of an air crash survivor.

A political agnostic himself, at least at the beginning, whose only ideology was Toujours l’audace!, Hinckle nonetheless understood that the new politics of the mid-Sixties, fed steroids by the war in Vietnam, would destroy the postwar liberal consensus, thus creating a target of opportunity for radical “theorists” such as Robert Scheer, whom Hinckle hired and who, in turn, brought Sol Stern, David Horowitz, and others in his circle on board. The idea was that the New Leftists would provide the steak while Hinckle himself would continue to provide the sizzle.

Warren regarded the publications traditionally produced by the Left as necrotic material, headed on a non-stop journey from the mimeograph machine to oblivion. Ramparts, however, would be the New Left’s version of Time. He hired the talented commercial artist Dugald Stermer to produce glossy covers that were Velcro for the mind and eye: Ho Chi Minh in a junk on the Mekong channeling Washington crossing the Delaware; a U.S. soldier crucified on a lonely cross in an Asian jungle; a jigsaw puzzle portrait of jfk with pieces left out around the head; a close-up of hands holding Scheer’s, Stern’s, Stermer’s, and Hinckle’s own draft cards—all of them on fire.

Hinckle and Scheer believed that the centrist liberals who had built American postwar power and stumbled into Vietnam were paper tigers. Ramparts attacked them and their creation in one story after another. This cherchez la femme journalism helped create the intellectual conditions that allowed the New Left to take over of the Democratic Party in 1972 and then inhabit the corpse—and name—of the liberalism it had just assassinated.

Amidst the swagger and posturing there were real coups, especially the 1967 story of how the cia had infiltrated and used the National Student Association in its Cold War games. The exposé was a bombshell, extravagantly publicized by The New York Times. Warren scorned the Times because it had suppressed the Bay of Pigs invasion in the interests of national security—a decision, he believed, that summarized everything wrong with American journalism before his arrival—but he also obsessively craved its approval.

The nsa story, and other Ramparts exposes about, particularly, the machinations of the cia, all proclaimed with full-page ads in the Times, helped bring muckraking, dormant since Ida Tarbell, back into vogue. (So much so, in fact, that within a few years “investigative journalism” was embraced by the mainstream press with superior resources that would help make Ramparts itself obsolete.) Other scoops followed, including the publication of Che Guevara’s diaries and a photojournalistic essay on America’s maiming of Vietnamese children that was said to have convinced Martin Luther King to come out against the war.

Buoyed by the advent of the counterculture and the growing importance of California as a state of mind, Ramparts’s San Francisco headquarters became a destination resort for the individuals and causes that defined radical chic. The magazine located a Green Beret named Donald Duncan who had left the Army because of his disillusioning experiences in Vietnam and put a formal portrait of him on the cover in his uniform and with all his medals for a searing first-person story—one of the first—about the futility of the war in which he’d fought. It helped get Eldridge Cleaver out of prison where he was serving time for rape and made him and Soul on Ice nationally famous. Cleaver soon joined Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. Warren was ecstatic the day he brought some of them to our office for a sit-down with the widow of Malcolm X. As they emerged from their cars, armed in accordance with their philosophy of “self-defense,” cops swarmed our intersection and one of those tense cinematic standoffs quickly evolved in which everyone is frozen with hands on weapons waiting for the tiny movement—a sound, a neural tic—that would trigger an apocalypse.

Many of the people who passed through the Ramparts orbit—Tom Hayden, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, etc.—did not interest Warren, who was at this point in his life allergic to political asceticism and moral posturing. But he immediately warmed to others like Hunter Thompson whom he saw as kindred spirits in their impatience with dogma, their creative heterodoxy, and their willingness to indulge large and self-destructive appetites without remorse. I met Thompson shortly after he published his “strange and terrible saga” of the Hell’s Angels and took him to the Ramparts office. He and Warren assimilated to each other immediately. We all went to Andre’s to eat and drink. While we were gone, Henry Luce got out of his cage and into Thompson’s rucksack. He ate some of the uppers he found stashed there and was comatose when we returned and had to be rushed to the vet to have his stomach pumped.

Warren loved the rococo conspiracy theories that bubbled up like gastric reflux during the Sixties. He joyously embraced the Jim Garrison “investigation” of jfk’s assassination and hired William Turner, a former fbi agent with experience in “black bag” operations, to be the magazine’s liaison with the New Orleans D.A. “Great fucking story,” Warren would say, his grandest compliment, when the hallucinatory copy rolled in about Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, and the other characters in Garrison’s theater of the absurd.

He loved doing what he called “the big takeout” and would craft “editorial essays” about some large topic—the advent of the Hippies; the growth of Left-wing Catholicism; the new phenomenon of Women’s Liberation—and then turn staff writers loose on it, just as Time, his bête noire and summum bonum, did. He would use the memos they produced to write the piece himself (although the byline was always “by the editors”), dragging into the office after a long day’s journey into a night of booze and typing with copy as impenetrable as Linear B, marked by cross outs and redirected paragraphs, along with loose inserts marked A, B, C, etc. (reaching N in one piece), and taped emendations enlarging pages to eleven-by-sixteen—a journalistic performance art utterly lost in an anodyne era of infinite drafts perfected by word processor.

By 1968, Ramparts had over 300,000 subscribers. Warren, of course, always claimed 450,000, but, whatever the true figure, it was an astounding accomplishment for a publication forcing “the System” to listen to what the New Left thought about it. But the more readers we acquired, the deeper the red ink in which we swam. The payroll was padded by hangers-on from the movement who used the magazine as support while they pursued their real vocation of throwing rocks at cops. Expenses were based on whim rather than budget. Easily bored by success, Warren always acted with impulsive financial unilateralism. (At one point, when the magazine was beginning to stabilize, he decided catastrophically to take it bi-weekly for a couple of months and then just as capriciously returned it to the status quo ante.)

Fundraising was never-ending, with supporters lustily wooed and then left unrequited once the donation was made. Martin Peretz was an enthusiastic backer until Ramparts ran a piece on the Six-Day War that served as a birth announcement of the Left’s future execration of Israel. A Jimmy Stewartesque Kansas history professor named Frederick Mitchell who couldn’t say no to Warren would eventually drop most of his near-million dollar patrimony in spasms of somewhat involuntary contributions to Ramparts. When the cupboard was getting bare, Warren kept the magazine going by selling its considerable tax loss to people looking for a quick deduction.

By 1969 the magazine was mired in a crisis even he couldn’t charm or connive his way out of. (It was also true, although we didn’t see it at the time, that “the Sixties,” Ramparts’s raison d’être, was beginning its long, self-destructive descent into political dada and histrionic fantasies of revolutionary violence.) His idea was to blithely declare bankruptcy that would wipe the slate clear and immediately begin a Siamese twin publication to be called Barricades. The rest of us didn’t buy it, believing that losing the name was losing everything. Not willing to sit around and talk with us about the boring details of cutting expenses and restructuring, Warren left.

It was never the same for Ramparts, although its body took the next five years to realize that its head was missing. Carried down by the shipwreck of the decade it had chosen to symbolize, the magazine became increasingly dour and sectarian, engaging in journalistic parodies of its former brio.

Nor was it ever the same for Warren himself. Soon after leaving Ramparts, he and his new friend, the former New York Times man Sidney Zion, found munificent backing for a publication called Scanlan’s Monthly, allegedly named after an Irish pig farmer. Warren managed to get a classic piece from Hunter Thompson on the Kentucky Derby, fear and loathing avant la lettre, but not much more than that. (Jann Wenner, who began Rolling Stone in his kitchen while working as a copy editor at Ramparts and who modeled himself on Warren, quickly grabbed up Thompson and the two of them went hand in hand to gonzo journalism.) Scanlan’s ended after less than a year with an acrimonious break up between Hinckle and Zion.

In his long half-life, Warren wrote a memoir called Making Lemonade. He got Francis Ford Coppola to hire him to edit City magazine in the mid-Seventies. (It seemed like a marriage made in heaven, but Warren could spend money faster than even Coppola could make it, and City soon disappeared.) He did some heavy-breathing conspiracy paperbacks on Castro, the cia, etc. with the former fbi agent Bill Turner. He took on editing jobs for obscure publications and wrote a column for a San Francisco startup newspaper no one ever read. Always on the lookout for a renaissance, he never escaped the large shadow of the man he had once been.

I saw him last in the late 1980s at Elaine’s where my friend David Horowitz and I had gone one afternoon in an homage to old times while we were publicizing our anti-Sixties book Destructive Generation. Warren was there in a corner drinking with Emile de Antonio. We had a nasty argument with the leftist film documentarian about the Sandinistas with Warren happily observing. Then we got up to go. “Why are you leaving?” he asked. “The bar isn’t closed, is it?”

Fitzgerald’s pronouncement about second acts, cited only to gain credibility for tales of self-regeneration these days, actually holds true for Warren Hinckle. But it almost doesn’t matter because the first act was filled with such glorious hugger mugger that it lasted a lifetime.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 35 Number 2, on page 12
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